Technological innovations in speech processing and other types of automated pattern recognition systems have led to widespread development and employment of automated intelligent systems such as IVR (interactive voice response) on-line services (e.g., banking), automated user identification (facial, fingerprint, speaker identification) for secured access to services and locations, voice-controlled systems for various environments (e.g., car, home, office, etc.) and various other systems.
Speech recognition system and/or natural language understanding can be implemented in automated system to enable conversational interaction with the automated system and allow a user to utter voice commands or queries that are automatically recognized, interpreted and executed by the system. For example, speech recognition may be implemented in car environments to allow a driver to provide commands via voice.
One problem with speech recognition and other recognition system is that such systems can make errors that result in undesirable or dangerous consequences. For instance, a speech recognition system in a car control application can misinterpret a driver command and thus activate the wrong command which can endanger the safety of the driver. For example, assume that a driver utters a command to “open a window” and that the car control system also has voice commands that can stop a car. If the system miss-recognized the voice command to “open a window” as the command to “stop the car”, such decoding mistake can lead to dangerous results as causing an accident if the driver did not intend to stop the car.
By way of further example, miss-recognition of a caller's request by a natural language understanding system installed at a bank center can result in undesirable consequences such as transferring money to a wrong account. Moreover, similar problems exist with respect to recognition errors in visual recognition systems. For example, in military applications, if a visual recognition system is designed to recognize enemy airplanes, if misrecognition occurs, the error can be fatal e.g., the military can shoot down a misrecognized friendly airplane.
Recently, research and development has began to develop systems that can identify driver states (angry, stressful, tired), predict driver behavior and situations (like whether a driver will cross a middle road line), and cognitive driver workload. The recognition of such situations is especially difficult and problematic, and recognition errors in such applications can lead to fatal consequences for drivers.